Green to the Gills

By Paul Greenberg

Published: June 18, 2006

On a bright, clear Arctic morning this March, I found myself in the Norwegian city of Tromso, staring down into a large green fiberglass tub in which several hundred sexually aroused cod described a slow, lazy circle in the temperature-controlled water below. Normally this is the kind of thing I enjoy. As a fisherman, I like being in the presence of fish. The living animal is somehow exhilarating, whether glimpsed crashing bait alongside a jetty or glowing vague and green 20 feet below the surface. A fish's appearance in the wild feels special and makes the fisherman feel lucky.

But luck had nothing to do with the cod swimming in the Norwegian tub that day. To the contrary, the fish in Tromso were there because of calculated human effort, and their stay in Tromso would allow them to participate in the culmination of a century of applied science. They were generation F0, the founding generation in a selective breeding program that aims to create a whole new race of cod. The progeny of wild cod gathered up from a variety of different fiords and offshore shoals, they were implanted with identifying microchips and paired up according to a methodology developed in some of Norway's most high-powered research institutions. After they are bred with their predetermined mates, their offspring, generation F1, will be grown in captivity to adulthood. Then the fastest-growing of the F1's will be selected for further breeding, resulting eventually in an even-more-tailored generation F2. ''And then we'll do the same again,'' said Kjersti Fjalestad, the director of the cod-breeding program at the Norwegian Institute of Fisheries and Aquaculture Research, while the cod swam in circles beneath us. ''Compare the families, find the best ones, and that's kind of the never-ending story.''

Breeding cod in an Arctic outpost might at first seem like one of those esoteric scientific endeavors doomed to be hidden away in a poor doctoral candidate's obscure Ph.D. thesis. But the Tromso cod-breeding facility is in fact the latest development in a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we eat. Until recently, all of the world's seafood was wild. Indeed, ocean fish are the last wild food on earth we eat with any regularity. That is all about to change. Fish farming, or ''aquaculture,'' as the practice is called by its practitioners, is now the fastest-growing form of food production in the world. Since 1990, it has increased at a rate of 10 percent a year. If this trends continues, within a decade more seafood will come from farms than from the wild.

Aquaculture in itself is not new. The Chinese invented it 3,000 years ago, using the waste products from cultivated silkworms to feed carp in small-scale freshwater-pond farms. In Norway and other Western countries, the relatively easy-to-grow Atlantic salmon has been successfully mass-produced for nearly 40 years. But until now, formidable biological barriers have prevented scientists from domesticating the thousands of other fish in the sea. Unlike salmon, which hatch from large nutrient-rich eggs and can be easily nourished on industrially produced feed pellets, the majority of edible ocean fish hatch from fragile, minuscule eggs and must be fed difficult-to-cultivate living microorganisms during their infancy. In captivity, they reach sexual maturity too quickly, fall prey to disease and, to top it off, tend to eat one another. If Norway can turn the cod into a viable commercial farm product, it would mark a significant resolution of many of these problems -- and a major step forward in what could be the large-scale domestication of the wild ocean.

Both the Bush administration and Congress are paying attention to fish farming, mostly because so many of the aquacultured products Americans eat come from abroad. Citing a national seafood trade deficit, Senators Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, and Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, are the co-sponsors of the National Offshore Aquaculture Act, which could make industrial-scale aquaculture possible in the United States for the first time. For decades, American environmentalists, fishermen and shore-front homeowners have kept aquaculture out of most state-controlled coastal waters, fearing that it could pollute the coastline and harm wild fish populations. The National Offshore Aquaculture Act, if it is approved, will bypass those conflicts by establishing aquaculture outside of any state's jurisdiction in federally controlled ocean territory, at least three miles offshore. Bringing the United States online as a major farmer of fish would be a big step toward achieving what proponents of the bill call the ''blue revolution'' -- a boost in the productivity of the oceans that would do for the sea what the ''green revolution'' of the 1960's did for the land. Fish farming proponents contend that aquaculture is the only way to meet the food demands of a relentlessly growing world population, due to double in another 60 years.

The idea of farming the sea, however, has many skeptics. Wild-fish advocates say that the projections being put forth by aquaculturists are based upon an essentially false assumption. Since most farmed fish are carnivorous predators (virtually the only carnivorous predators humans eat besides the occasional dog), environmentalists say that fish farming doesn't really create any net food gain for the world. In frequently cited research, the Stanford economist Rosamond Naylor and others claim that around two pounds of wild prey fish are required to create one pound of farmed fish. If we continue to grow aquaculture, we will shrink the populations of wild predator fish because we will have taken their prey.